Hello there friends. If you’ve been wondering who the random guy is replying to your comments on this blog I’d like to put your mind at ease by stepping out of the shadows and reveal myself as Scott – Hayden’s neighbor, employee, friend and basketball mentor. For now, my origins are not important, but bringing the concept of one page niche sites to the world is.
So here we go…..
As any former no hat intern can attest to, there is more than one way to a niche build a site. Here is an insight into one of the unique site structures we are currently using to build and rank sites – The One Pager.
What is a one page site:
Well, a one page site is….. errrr….. a niche site that is just one page.
Sounds easy right? Well it’s a little more complicated than that as we’ll get to later, but we basically take an entire niche site and put all of the content on one main page and make it an epic page. Think of it as an ultimate resource on a particular topic.
Why build one?
There can be a few reasons why you could benefit from building a one page site, and here they are:
The niche is small and you can’t really find enough long tails to justify building out the site into a full 30-50 page niche site. It could even be a sub-niche in which you can only really compete for 1 or 2 decent keywords with confidence.
You can jam that main page with back links and not have to worry about diluting link juice by linking to multiple pages on your site. Basically you get the most bang for your buck when it comes to link building.
You can use jump to text links on the page to rank long tail or minor keywords. This means that we can target as many keywords on a page as we like and they will all benefit from being on a page that is being heavily link built.
You can target some harder long term keywords whilst picking up all the easier keywords along the way.
You can focus all of your energy on making one great page and make it the best resource online for that topic.
Here are a few basic details on how we structure our one page sites:
The minimum content length we like to do for a one pager is 3000 words but ideally you want to get it up over 5000 words.
Include a heap of images, YouTube videos, tables and whatever else you can do to get users hanging around the site and clicking on stuff.
When you do your keyword research organize all your long tails and minor keywords into related groups. Then instead of creating a new page on the site, create a section of content that is at least 250 words long and is optimized to target that bunch of long tail or minor keywords.
Then make sure each of these sections of text has an optimized heading which is included in a jump to text menu near the top of the page. There are plugins out there to simplify this such as “table of contents plus”.
Skip the jump to text links and you’re toast.
If you do it right, you’ll see these headings appearing in the serps with a link directly to that specific heading and section of content.
Since I’m a cow enthusiast, I was casually browsing for information on cows when I stumbled across an example which I can share with you:
Here is the jump to link target from the image above if you’re interested:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holstein_Friesian_cattle#Red_and_white_Holsteins
Does this really work?
Yes
Beware!
Check the number of keyword uses because you’ll be using plenty of keywords in the section headings which also appear in the jump to text menu so pay attention or you risk an OOP.
Wanna build one?
Our internships generally include building a one page site plus at least one of the other site structures we currently use, of which there are 3.
Confused?
If you’re still not quite sure what a jump to text link does click here to read the important bits again.
Questions or comments? Fire away!
dante says:
Will you guys be revealing the other 2 site structures in future posts?
Scott Davis says:
Sure why not.
Alistair Cochrane says:
Interesting. I’m going to give this a go.
Scott Davis says:
Yeh give it a go!
Will says:
+1 for:
Since I’m a cow enthusiast, I was casually browsing for information on cows when I stumbled across an example which I can share with you
Josh says:
Scott,
I have one burning question . . .
Why do you like cows so much? Holsteins are best!
Does it ever make sense to convert a 30 page niche site to a long, one pager?
Patient Zero
Manny says:
Interesting! I’ve always been a big fan of one page designs but didn’t realise the power of jump to text links was worth it for seo, going to test it now :D
What are your other site structures? Any crazy silo tactics?
Julian says:
Scott, thanks for this. I really appreciate it and all the other content you guys have published on this site. It’s helped me a lot.
Two nights ago I started rebuilding the homepage of one of my money sites using this structure. Before that it was seeing rankings on three terms.
I finished it last night and had to add polish today.
Following the rebuild it’s seeing rankings on over 20 terms! And that’s in just 1-2 days. One of the terms went into the top 10 within 24 hours! First time I’ve experienced that.
Granted, the site’s been up all year. I built out 7 weak links (av. DA 18-21) initially. I’ve dripped out about 6 DA30+ links over the last 1-2 weeks.
What I noticed is that this structure actually forces you to produce a better quality page. I actually enjoy visiting it more now and it’s turned into a 7000 words+ authority piece of content. The jump to text links and table of contents makes the user experience better. Add one of those jump back to top of page things and it’s all gravy.
I recommend using the jump to text plugin mentioned by Scott in this article. It does everything for you seemlessly.
Massman from Boston says:
That is a cool idea…will have to give that a try!
reg says:
Googles been playing silly buggars. re: Include a heap of images, YouTube videos, tables and whatever else you can do to get users hanging around the site and clicking on stuff.
I did that. I created my own content i wrote myself and made my own comments writing from a first person view with supporting links and even open licence images that i modified. All was thought to be above board but google took all this linking to youtube i guess and images and banned my site from adsense.
Its interesting to note that even after some navigation modifications and tweaks as suggested by the adsense “team” and a reappeal, the site was again rejected. Interestingly I deleted the page they claimed was scraped (totally written by me) and again rejected.
I checked the stats and interestingly they visited the old page link (which had gone) and had not inspected any other parts of the website yet applied a blanket “its scraped” on 50 pages (wow, really hard working scraper!!) on the site.
Adios.. thats that adsense site banned.
Fernando Biz says:
great article and really good to know now it’s ideal to have 3000+ words on the landing pages. I used to do 800-1000 and they ranked well but i guess using 3000+ should be way effective! Thanks for the ideas.
Vinicius says:
Nice post. But here’s a question: why don’t you create that authority 3000+ words page within a bigger, Authority website?
I’m not quite convinced of that “losing link juice for other pages” reason.. Could you explain better the advantages?
Jon says:
Hi guys,
I know it’s been a while since this post went live but does this one-page niche site concept still work in 2016?
I really like to start one out. I just have a few questions:
How long does it take on average to see some sales?
How do you guys do niche and keyword research?
Is there anything else I have to know about this concept?
Have a good one,
Jon